Demon of the Belfry: The Murders of Blanch Lamont and Minnie Williams

Episode 397: In April 1895, two young women, both twenty-one, from San Francisco’s Emmanuel Baptist Church vanished days apart. Blanche Lamont, a dedicated teacher-in-training, and Minnie Williams, a hardworking domestic with dreams of her own classroom, both entered the same church and never left. Their bodies were later discovered inside the building, setting off one of the most sensational murder trials in California history.

This episode explores the lives of Blanche and Minnie, the discovery of their deaths, the investigation that followed, and the arrest and trial of Canadian-born medical student William Henry Theodore Durrant, accused of killing them.

Sources:
Clara at the Door with a Revolver — Carolyn Whitzman (UBC Press, 2023)
Toronto Public Library – Digitized Toronto newspapers
Newspapers.com – Historical Toronto press coverage
City of Toronto Archives
Archives of Ontario – Mercer Reformatory & judicial records
Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 — Barrington Walker
Afua Cooper – Black Canadian history resources
1897 film of convicted killer Durrant shapes prison policy -
Theodore Durrant
Sympathy for the Devil: The Emmanuel Baptist Murders of Old San Francisco
By Virginia A. McConnell
Theo Durrant — The Origin of Monsters — Crime Library on truTV.com
True Detective Mysteries, February 1929: Internet Archive
The tale of the 'Demon of the Belfry,' San Francisco's forgotten Jack the Ripper

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